In my youth (recently my granddaughter, commenting no a picture she saw of my giving a bracha to her mom, said: Zeidy... you used to have black hair?) I thought that the Chafeitz Chaim only wrote Mishna Brura on the Orach Chaim section of Shulchan Aruch because he ran out of time (it did take about 40 years to write the משנה ברורה, so not a totally crazy thought). But no, the משנה ברורה is for regular folk. A sefer to have on your shelf for when those doubts come up about the laws of daily living. If a regular folk type person needs to clarify a doubt about milk and meat, nida, how to write a get or run a wedding, then he should run to his LOR -- local Orthodox rabbi.
That being said, and since I am retired now (have I mentioned that?), I now have time to delve into new areas of Torah and halacha that were beyond my reach before. In particular, I have begun looking into the halachos of איסור והיתר by looking at meat and milk -- at the suggestion of my rabbaim, of course. I am using the sefer מעדני השולחן, which I have described in a previous TftD. On the surface, מעדני השולחן appears to be very similar to the משנה ברורה.
That's what I thought when I started, anyway. What I had failed to appreciate is that these s'farim are built on a broad and deep foundation of concepts that the text expects one to know with clarity. That happens in any technical field, of course, but in the past I have learned the topics and concepts in the course of my general studies in the classroom. Here I am now trying to build the infrastructure while living in the building.
The particular halachos I am learning now are what causes combinations of meat and milk to become forbidden. I would liken this to cases I know from chemistry. You take a poisonous gas -- chlorine -- and mix it one to one with a flammable metal -- sodium -- in just the right way and it becomes ordinary table salt. On the flip side, you take a breathable gas -- nitrogen -- and mix it with a common powder -- carbon -- and you get cyanide, a dangerous poison.
The kashrus of milk and meat is analogous, but I don't know all the mechanisms. One new one to me was salt as a reactive agent. Wait... let me take one step back and push this chemistry analogy a bit further. For a chemical reaction to occur, it isn't enough to just put the chemicals next to each other. Oh, no... they need to be "encouraged" to react. We call that encouragement "reaction energy." Usually the energy is supplied by heat, but it can also be supplied by electric spark, pressure, and so on. No matter how it is supplied, the "encouragement" is called "reaction energy."
For a milk and meat combination to become forbidden by the Torah, they must be cooked together. How hot do they need to be to be considered "cooked"? Boiling hot. Not 212°F (or 100°C for my international readers), but the Hebrew term we use is רותח/boiling. It turns out also that -- just as in my chemistry analogy -- no matter how we get the meat and milk to react, we refer to the state in which they will react as רותח/boiling.
Now comes the fun part. Adding salt will get milk and meat to react. How much salt is called "רותח/boiling"? Enough that you wouldn't want to eat it because it is so salty. Which leads to the following interesting and perhaps counterintuitive result: Imagine you have salted meat to get ready for the BBQ. Obviously, there you didn't add enough salt to make the meat inedible. However, any liquid dripping from the meat now while waiting for the BBQ may very well be so salty that you wouldn't want to eat it. So if the meat itself were to fall on a piece of cheese, no worries. Grab it off and rinse. However, if the brine leaking from the meat drips onto that same cheese, you will likely need to cut off a bit of the cheese. See Shulchan Aruch, Yore Deah, 91:5 and the Rema there.
Two things. First, now you see why it takes me so long to learn this section of Shulchan Aruch, I need to build all new analogies to my science background before I can really understand what is going on. Second, this gives you more insight into why no one wants to learn with me.
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